Drop-Time in Hudson Square
Not long ago last week, I strode with purpose around Varick and Greenwich Streets when suddenly I entered the realm I call "Drop-Time": I was alone with multitudes for the long draft between one heartbeat and the next. (For my definition of "Drop-Time,"
click here
).
I am not sure from whence or how the punctuation sprang, what the trigger was. A woman glanced at me imperiously as she crossed the street, her thousand-dollar boots stamping the zebra, her scarf as well-combed as her hair. Two men muttered about advertising rates, three colleagues joked about something as they waited in line at the lunch-truck (which claimed to purvey the world's best grilled cheese sandwiches). Every storefront a tableau glimpsed, my reflection mingling with the workers inside at the chocolatier's, at the deli, at the bank-that-was-almost-like-a-living-room. A hundred sharply defined details, a nose here, an eyebrow there, a spoon poised in mid-air between a bowl and a mouth, words, words, words on every surface; the colors of red and teal, maroon, angular black, lots of brick and yellow. Strips of conversation slid through the air, combined, unknotted, added a coating of words to the muted roar of the trucks on the Holland Tunnel approaches.
In Drop-Time, all those sensations slow into one enormous yet intimate moment, the enjambment between the worlds. I see everything and hear everything for that one instant, a great diastolic in-rush of sight and sound. Captured in the poetry of breathing, the flight of words above the reality of the people and places they describe. I taste the soup on the spoon, I know what is spoken at the truck of the grilled cheese sandwiches, I forgive the woman her arrogance.
Sunbeams frozen on the sidewalks. Down the side-streets, a diminishing perspective that ends in grey warehouses along the Hudson. Straitened vision that leads to Gjallar's Bridge with its dim pallor, and the prospect of a ferry across the river towards sunset.
My gaze returns to the world in front of me, the throngs along Varick. I float for one second with a squadron of pigeons, see all of us below as motes among the buildings.
A taxi-driver hits his horn, the light shifts to green, someone yells something into a cell-phone...*blink, blunk*...I am just again inside myself, one among the many, a hyphen nearing my destination.
Carrying within me though the memory and future promise of Drop-Time.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
I am not sure from whence or how the punctuation sprang, what the trigger was. A woman glanced at me imperiously as she crossed the street, her thousand-dollar boots stamping the zebra, her scarf as well-combed as her hair. Two men muttered about advertising rates, three colleagues joked about something as they waited in line at the lunch-truck (which claimed to purvey the world's best grilled cheese sandwiches). Every storefront a tableau glimpsed, my reflection mingling with the workers inside at the chocolatier's, at the deli, at the bank-that-was-almost-like-a-living-room. A hundred sharply defined details, a nose here, an eyebrow there, a spoon poised in mid-air between a bowl and a mouth, words, words, words on every surface; the colors of red and teal, maroon, angular black, lots of brick and yellow. Strips of conversation slid through the air, combined, unknotted, added a coating of words to the muted roar of the trucks on the Holland Tunnel approaches.
In Drop-Time, all those sensations slow into one enormous yet intimate moment, the enjambment between the worlds. I see everything and hear everything for that one instant, a great diastolic in-rush of sight and sound. Captured in the poetry of breathing, the flight of words above the reality of the people and places they describe. I taste the soup on the spoon, I know what is spoken at the truck of the grilled cheese sandwiches, I forgive the woman her arrogance.
Sunbeams frozen on the sidewalks. Down the side-streets, a diminishing perspective that ends in grey warehouses along the Hudson. Straitened vision that leads to Gjallar's Bridge with its dim pallor, and the prospect of a ferry across the river towards sunset.
My gaze returns to the world in front of me, the throngs along Varick. I float for one second with a squadron of pigeons, see all of us below as motes among the buildings.
A taxi-driver hits his horn, the light shifts to green, someone yells something into a cell-phone...*blink, blunk*...I am just again inside myself, one among the many, a hyphen nearing my destination.
Carrying within me though the memory and future promise of Drop-Time.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
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